Android and Apple: tablets in the ESL classroom

In previous posts I have been very positive about the role that the iPad could play in ESL education. The nature of the tablet form factor and the so-simple-a-child-could-use-it interface makes it a wonderful tool for bringing technology into the classroom and offering many new ways for students to interact with each other and with the language. You only have to look around the internet to realise that I’m not the only one that thinks that way. Ipad adoption by schools and teachers is growing daily and the variety of use case scenarios expanding all the time.

But..and it is a big ‘but’, the iPad is very, very expensive, certainly beyond the reach of many individuals and also beyond the budgets of many schools. Until recently there hasn’t been any significant alternatives, but now we are beginning to see many more tablets come onto the market, particularly ones running Google’s Android operating system. The Android tablets that have been available so far have not been particularly usable, largely because Google hadn’t designed an Operating System that was specifically for tablets, but now they have released one called Honeycomb and we’re beginning to see tablets appear on the market with the new tablet-optimised OS installed on it.

And I’ve bought one. Probably shouldn’t have but it was just too tempting, particularly as the one I got comes with an integrated keyboard that means it can double as a fairly decent netbook replacement (and finding a way to type effectively on a tablet is one of the biggest hurdles to wider adoption in my view). It’s called the Asus Eee Pad Transformer and is currently only available in the UK - and at the moment without the keyboard that makes it compelling, but that will be available soon.

My new toy

My old toy and my new toy

So, I thought this might be a chance to do a quick rundown of the pros/cons of using Android tablets in the ESL classroom. Why might teachers/students/schools choose these over the iPad? Can it offer anything that the Apple device doesn’t? Here’s a quick rundown...

The Good........

Cost

Actually, at the moment there isn’t a huge difference between the price of an iPad and a higher-end Android device. The cheapest version of the iPad 2 is only £399 while I picked up my Asus tablet for £379, so hardly a massive saving there. But - just as with Android mobile phones - a huge range of tablets will be coming onto the market in a variety of shapes/sizes and at a variety of price points. Expect to see this price come down very rapidly. Also, if schools are willing to put up with an older operating system and a little less functionality, they can pick up a basic Android tablet for as low as £120-150 pound. Of course it won’t be as slick as the iPad or as easy to use, but you will still get that basic form factor and also a lot of decent Google apps such as Google Maps and Gmail. The iPad, on the other hand, is unlikely to drop in price any time soon.

A variety of form factors

The iPad comes in one size and that’s it. But with Android there are more options in terms of screen size and also the kinds of features/add-ons you can use with it. So, for example, you can get Android tablets with a 7” screen, an 8.9” screen or a larger 10” screen. Some of them come with special pens for drawing/writing with, others have better cameras on the front and the back.

There are also more options for connecting cards/peripherals to Android tablets. For example many Android tablets come with some kind of memory card slot (such as micro SD or SD) for getting files/images/video on and off the device or they might have a USB port, meaning that you can plug in keyboards, mice or other USB peripherals. This might be particularly handy if students want to transfer images/videos/audio files they’ve recorded with a camera or mobile phone. This is much more difficult on the iPad. I’m constantly running up against the issue of how to get things on or off my iPad and I often give up in frustration.

Flash support

Famously, the iPad doesn’t support Flash in its browser. This means that many sites that have Flash elements on their pages just won’t display on the iPad. Now, the iPad does get round this by having a vast number of dedicated apps that can often replace a website, but not for all of them, and many of the ones teachers use with their students still don’t have an app, or they do have an app but it has considerably reduced functionality. Android, on the other hand, has had Flash support for some time now and on most devices you can view Flash sites through the browser.

To give you a couple of examples of this. I often use a site called Voicethread with my students. This site enables students to create interactive slideshows with pictures, text and audio recordings and other students can watch them and add their own comments. It works wonderfully well in the ESL classroom - students can create personalised presentations on their family/country/job and share them with their classmates. However, there is no app for the iPad and you cannot view these slideshows through the iPad browser because they contain Flash (see pic).

What you see (or don't see) on the iPad

Android on the other hand does a pretty good job of displaying them through the browser (see pic below) and while editing is less than perfect, it still is possible.

What you see on the Android tablet

Another good example is Xtranormal,  a popular site used by many teachers with students to create short animated movies. Students can choose the settings, the characters, write the dialogue and then view and shaer what they've created.

Again, you can’t view the full site on the iPad because of the lack of Flash. There is a mobile app for the iphone, but this is significantly less functional than the desktop version. On my Android tablet, however, I can access the full desktop site and use it exactly as I would on a PC.

Ipad browser version (notice the Xtranormal sign where the video should be)

And this is the fuller Android browser version

I know that there is a general move away from Flash in websites, but that is going to take quite a long time and at the moment many of the most popular ESL websites still contain a lot of flash elements.

Flexibility

Much has been written about the ‘openness’ of Android in comparison with Apple’s operating system (iOS). I’m not that technically minded so I’m not sure whether Android is any more ‘open’ than iOS. However, I always feel that Android tablets/devices offer a lot more flexibility than Apple ones, particularly in sharing information and getting things on and off the device. So, for example, when I write a note or save a picture on the iPad my first instinct is to be able to access it so I can send it to another device, either my phone or my PC. Yet the options are very limited. The iPad doesn’t have any kind of file system and you cannot transfer files/pictures via bluetooth, so you often end up having to email it to yourself or sending it to a third-party option such as Dropbox. It feels very cumbersome in this day and age to have to resort to that.

Conversely, Android has a wealth of options for getting stuff on and off the device. It has a file system just like on your PC and it’s very easy to move/send your stuff from one place on the device to another. Or to another device. I found this out this week when I was on holiday with my family. My wife had taken some pictures with her phone and we wanted to view them on a tablet. It was much easier to send them across to my Android tablet than it was to my iPad. Given that so much of what we do in class involves the sharing of created content (documents, images, video), it seems that Android wins out over the iPad in this respect.

The Bad....

Usability

Apple make incredibly slick and user friendly products and this is one of the key reasons for their success. Give a young child or old person the iPad and it will take them at most a few minutes to work out how to use it, even if they've never picked up a tablet before. This simplicity of use is a godsend in the classroom. Nothing can bring a lesson screeching to a halt faster than confusion about how to use a particular piece of technology or software programme. I've had lessons go belly up because students couldn't work out how to register for a site or find a particular setting (for some reason changing the volume on our computers at school is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, God knows why it should be so difficult).

Android tablet - and smartphones - have a much steeper learning curve. They tend to use menus a lot more than Apple devices and it can be confusing to find what you are looking for at times. With the added flexibility of Android, you do get an unwelcome layer of complexity that could cause confusion for both the teacher and the students in the classroom and could lead to a lot of time wasted on troubleshooting the problems. And just the whole experience on Apple products is so much smoother. Things just work. You press an icon on the iPad and it does what you expect and it does it immediately. Android tends to be a lot less smooth, you might experience lag when swiping between screens or scrolling though the browser, programmes shut down more often without you wanting them too. For a teacher who may feel uncomfortable with technology, the iPad is probably going to be their choice every time.

Fragmentation

This is probably the biggest criticism of the Android platform, the fact that so many of its devices are running on different versions of the Operating System. And often manufacturers add their own 'skin' on top of that OS to give it some differentiation from their competitors. What this means first off is that there can be problems of compability. You may want to download a fantastic app you've found for your students, but it may turn out that it won't run on the version of the OS installed on the students' devices. I'm having this problem with my Android tablet. There just haven't been that many apps designed for this new tablet OS and so a lot of them either don't work with it or don't use the screen space effectively.

Apple on the other hand have a consistent user experience across their devices. If you've used an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will know how to use an iPad. All these devices run the same OS, so the compatability in terms of the apps you download is incredible.

The Ugly...

Apps? What apps?

And this leads us onto the biggest issue with Android tablets: the lack of apps. The iPad has tens of thousands of apps available for it, many of very high quality and many of them directed towards education and learning. Android tablets have very few available that have been optimised for a larger screen. Yes, you can use all the apps available for the Android smartphones, but they don't always scale very well and some of them just outright don't work. I'm not sure exactly what the figures are, but I know the iPad has somewhere in the region of 60000 apps available for it (and those have been designed specifically for that device) while the new Android tablet OS has somewhere in the region of 30-50. That's a big difference, and while that will definitely change in the coming months, the iPad clearly has a headstart in this respect and certainly is far better equipped for the classroom at the moment.

Final thoughts

There's no 'winner' here in terms of which tablet schools or individuals should choose for the classroom. In terms of breadth of software and ease of use, the iPad wins hands down. But Android is going to appeal to those people on a tighter budget, and the ability to share content more easily also makes it very attractive. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate in educational institutions over the next couple of years. The good thing though is that now there is more choice and the choice is going to get bigger every day in terms of finding the device that will work for your school or students.

Free promo codes for Cambridge's Phonetic Focus app available

The very kind people at Cambridge Online have given me ten free promo codes for their latest iphone/ipod touch/ipad app Phonetics Focus to give away. These are only for the US itunes store (unfortunately) so you’ll have to have an account there to take advantage of it. I’ll do it like this: the first ten people to comment on this blog post will get one of the promo codes so you can download the app for free (retail price in the UK is £1.19, so I’m assuming it’s about $2 in the US store).

I don’t have a US account so I actually had to buy the app myself (!) but I didn’t mind. The app is based on the Cambridge website of the same name and is a website that I have been recommending to my students for months now to help them with their English pronunciation. There’s loads of great games and activities to do on the website, versions of hangman, matching, mazes, pelmanism.

The iphone/ipod touch app is a pared down version of what’s on the website, but it’s still the best ESL/EFL pronunciation app out there. There are four sections in the app:

The first section is the whole phonemic chart, you can click on the symbols and hear the sound.

The second section is simply an illustrated poster of the phonemic chart, showing the sound, a word containing it and a picture of the word. It’s a shame that there’s no interactive element here, it would have been useful to be able to click the words and hear them. The one useful thing you can do here is take a snapshot of certain parts of the poster using the camera icon on the page. 

However, the next section does give you those words from the poster on individual pages for you to click and hear. 

The last section is a short quiz section where you listen to two similar phonemes and have to choose the correct one.

The app isn’t as fully featured as the website (which is a shame) but it’s still one of the best EFL/ESL apps out there. I haven’t been impressed by the quality of ESL apps on the market, it’s mainly unexciting vocab list/quiz apps so it’s encouraging to see companies like Cambridge begin to release stuff which is a bit slicker and a bit more involved. Hope to see it continue.

So, anyhow, add your comments below and the first ten get the promo code to download for free.

Video review of flashcard apps for ipad and iphone

In my previous post I had a look at some of the flashcard apps available for the Android platform to help ESL students revise vocabulary. I've also now done a shortish video review of a couple of similar apps available for the ipad and iphone. The review itself was done on the ipad as I don't actually own an iphone but these apps are or will be available on both devices. I looked at Flashcards Deluxe Lite and Flashcards Plus and at the end I also created a short clip about the Quizlet website.

The role of the ipad in ESL

Ok, I caved. I wasn’t planning to buy an ipad, but after looking at one in a store and debating internally for about...ooh...four or five seconds, I handed over the money and walked out with the cheapest 16GB wifi version.

my ipad...apologies for the quality, taken with my cameraphone

First impressions

It is a gorgeous piece of tech, heavier than you think it will be but the screen is perfectly sized for watching videos, browsing the internet and reading ebooks when lying on the sofa or your bed. It does get a little weighty in your hands after a while and you find yourself having to adjust your hands and position to get comfortable again. I also found that my hand naturally covers the speaker on the right hand side when watching video and can mute it, so I have to move a little to uncover it.

It is clearly pitched between a laptop and a smartphone and it does seem to occupy that niche very well. Many people say it is just a large ipod touch, but I would question that ‘just’. Yes, it is a large ipod touch, but that isn’t a bad thing at all. The added size and the tablet form factor makes it inherently more social than a laptop or smartphone. When I got home with the ipad - and gotten over the slightly embarrassed explanation of why I’d bought it given the number of similar gadgets in our house - my wife and son immediately wanted to get their hands on it and it felt very natural just to pass it around and share as you would a newspaper or a photo. Reading ebooks on it was very comfortable, it was great to sit down on the sofa with my son and read him the Winnie the Pooh book while he followed along and looked at the pictures.

There are some obvious drawbacks, the lack of flash in the browser and the lack of multi-tasking being just two, but I think they are non-issues. Multi-tasking will come in the autumn with an OS update and most sites that require flash are likely to have a custom-made app for the ipad sooner or later.

A bigger issue for me is text input. The onscreen keyboard just isn’t that comfortable for extensive text input, and in fact it is far more awkward than the iphone because it’s so large. You can’t grip it in two hands and type with your thumbs like on the iphone because it’s just too wide and it doesn’t feel natural to lay it down on a flat surface to try to type like on a full-sized keyboard. You end up holding it in one hand and then tapping on the keyboard with another, but this is really slow. I wouldn’t want to write a long email or conduct an IM conversation with anyone using this technique.

The best way is to use some kind of external keyboard and Apple has released a keyboard and dock combo for it (for £55!), but this naturally limits its portability. I did have an old fold-up Stowaway bluetooth keyboard lying around and it paired and worked perfectly (see pic below), but the problem is then that you need something to prop the ipad up so you can see it. I might need to buy a cover with an integrated stand, but again this all just adds to the cost and bulk of the device. 

the ipad paired with a bluetooth keyboard

Overall though, it really is a lustworthy piece of tech and this is coming from someone who is NOT a particularly big Apple fan. I don’t own an iphone, preferring Android as a smartphone OS and I’ve never owned a Mac (either desktop or laptop).

How it could be used in (and out) of the ESL classroom.

When I first heard and read about the ipad, I was dismissive about its usefulness in ESL. But having used one now for a couple of days, I can see that it could be a wonderful tool in the classroom. Why?

Ease of use

Firstly, it is not a complicated device to use as anyone who owns an iphone, ipod touch or ipad will testify. In many ways this is better for the teachers than the students as it’s often the teachers who are most freaked out by tech in the classroom. It’s very unlikely that teachers will need much technical support after a little initial training with the device and the likelihood of it breaking down in class are fairly minimal. Also, it’s instant on, there’s no wait for it to boot up and the battery life is outstanding, you can easily get 10-11 hours of intensive use out of it from one charge.

It’s naturally collaborative

As mentioned above, the size and form factor of the ipad makes it perfect for collaboration. Just as it’s easy for a student to show their partner a page from their notebook, it’s just as easy for a student to show something on the ipad screen. This is also helped by the wide viewing angle it has. Smartphones are great, but the screens are small and there’s a limit to what can be displayed on it. Laptops - even the smaller netbooks - are more cumbersome to move around and they naturally create a barrier between one student and another (though they do have the advantage of a keyboard). If we think about a communicative classroom where we want students to talk and share with each other, move around and interact with each other, the ipad seems perfect for that.

There’s an app for that...

Despite those damn adverts, the popularity of the iphone, ipod touch and ipad means that almost any computer or web tool that you might want to use with your students is available on the device. When I think of the kinds of things that I take my students into the computer room for, I can almost always find an ipad app that can replicate that function. Creating blogs, wikis, podcasts, various forms of social networking, you tube videos, news sites, all of these things can be done directly on the ipad.

No more ‘we’re going to the computer room today’

One of the barriers to full integration of technology in the (ESL) classroom is the classroom/computer lab distinction. Somehow, going to the computer lab is seen as something separate from what goes on in the classroom, there are teachers who ‘use’ the computer room and those who don’t. In this way, computers and technology become this scary other that naturally makes a lot of teachers nervous.

The ipad might be a way of bringing the computer lab to the classroom and making the use of technology less scary for teachers. Rather than the teachers taking the class to the computer room, a class set of ipads or similar tablet-like computers could be distributed in the classroom and I think this will make this technology feel more integrated. 

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These are just my initial thoughts after a couple of days with the ipad. My opinion of it might change over time of course, but I do see them as natural complement to mobile phones as learning tools. I think that mobile phones work best outside the classroom as a means of autonomous learning on the part of the students while the ipad will function well inside the classroom as a natural replacement for textbooks or computers. And I can see many ways that students will be able to combine both of them to provide meaningful and interesting classroom activities. For example, students might go out and take pictures/video of their family/house/workplace etc, upload them to the internet to a place like Facebook or Picasa and then in class show them and discuss them with  their peers using the ipad.

Obviously a major barrier is going to be the cost of these things. I bought the cheapest version here in the UK and it cost  £429 while the most expensive version with wifi and 3G is a whopping £699. Even a class set of these is going to be beyond most institutions. And to be honest, Apple are not particularly great at providing discounts for bulk purchases of these things for education. But the hope is that over time (just as with smartphones and laptops), other companies will come along and provide similar products at a lower price point. There have already been several tablets released running the Android OS and the number is bound to increase over time. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for all your students to have smartphones in class, but this is becoming more and more a reality as the cost of them comes down.